Riccardo Cenedella shapes functional indoor furniture from carpet waste

UK based designer Riccardo Cenedella’s sculptural lamps and stools, assembled together from discarded carpet waste and touted ‘Carpet Matter’ are innovative products that fulfil the need for sustainability. Cenedella, who hails from Italy, performed extensive experimentation to beget these utilitarian products that reference the textures of naturally occurring entities. The surface of these sculptural art pieces resemble both the artificially created texture of thermocol boards as well the naturally occurring coarse tactility associated with rocks. The flexible luminaires, created using LED Neonflex and cradled in the recycled supports crafted for them, appear in direct contrast against the roughness of the latter. “The Carpet Matter is a great representation of my practice: as an alchemist, through ingenuity, persistence and hand-on experimentation, a useless material is transformed into design artefacts,” says Cenedella.

In a country that produces 400,000 tonnes of carpet waste every year, this useful creation ceases to be an example of innovation alone. Instead, it presents itself as a feasible solution to tackle one of the many causes of increase in waste pollution by turning to circular design. “I see design as a tool to create environmental awareness and positively affect the world we live in,” explains Cenedella.

The defining feature of the stools and luminaires created by Cenedella is not their form or function, for these are iterations of the oft used shapes found in functional design and the utilitarian role fulfilled by regular furniture items. Instead, the materials and the process employed to create them dominate the narrative of these objects. For Cenedella, the driving force behind his projects are “process and narrative”, following which the “form” of the structure takes shape. With the aim to bring focus to the overconsumption of easily available products in the market and the large amount of waste produced from it, the Italian designer has utilised waste items that continue to retain some of their materiality even after they have transitioned from waste to useful products.

Synthetic carpets are usually knitted together as composite objects that do not possess the scope for disassembly. Hence, most of the discarded carpets and carpet pieces end up in incinerators or are dumped in landfills, leading to a further increase in pollution. Cenedella picked out these discarded carpet offcuts from textile and carpet stores in London and experimented with them to develop their materiality in such a manner that they could be assembled into solid cohesive objects.

This intensive process involved the creation of metal cylindrical moulds and MDF compression moulds which were then used to craft the legs and tops of tables respectively. Within these moulds, Cenedella poured a mix of the cut up and heated pieces of the different carpets, which, upon cooling, became hard. By further cutting and refining these moulded pieces and assembling them with the help of custom bolts, he was able to create the final versions of the furniture pieces. “I developed a technique that allows me to reshape and repurpose this material for the creation of design artefacts,” says Cenedella.

Riccardo Cenedella, as a designer, focuses his attention on utilising waste to create something meaningful. After graduating in product design from Politecnico di Torino, Cenedella, over the next few years, experimented with different materials and tools to develop his creative faculties. However, his desire to create something useful and with a purpose later drove him to explore the field of circular design. Citing his inspiration in Charles Levi-Strauss, whose theories he came across during his tenure as a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, Cenedella, in a new turn in his career, utilises only waste materials to create his desired sustainable designs.

The Italian product and furniture designer is currently experimenting with synthetic fibres and colour dyes to create chair pieces that will soon be exhibited as part of the No Space For Waste exhibition in the Isola Design District at Milan Design Week 2022.

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